Is your acquirer adding value?
Merchants have to deal with a larger, more complex range of operational challenges than ever before – and the payments process is certainly no exception. Navigating growth plans, regulatory hurdles, new technologies, changing customer preferences, fraud risk, and cost control are ongoing battles for merchants of all sizes and across all sectors.
Understandably, most merchants don’t have a huge pool of in-house resources focused on unpicking all these challenges – their focus needs to be on the core business. But luckily, there are external resources that can really make a difference in ensuring the payments challenges are addressed, and the right balance is struck to support business success. Acquirers are uniquely placed to be that supporting resource – they can make a real difference by helping merchants with monitoring fraud, issuer liaison, providing advice on new market entry and a range of other challenges.
Vendor or partner?
If your acquirer is purely providing you with just the hardware and minimum connections you need to process card payments, then you’re missing out on a lot of potential value.
In fact, an experienced, proactive acquirer should be acting as your payments partner rather than just a supplier of the necessary tools. We’ve put together some ideas on five ways your acquirer can add real value to your business.
Acquirers can help you to:
Improve conversions
Converting customers is the top KPI for most merchants, yet conversion rates are often still very low, with a large percentage of customers abandoning their order at the point of payment. Delivering the right customer checkout experience can make a huge difference. Acquirers should enable merchants to optimise their payment page and improve the transaction flow, to create a fast, seamless checkout process that minimises cart abandonment and maximises conversions.
Improve acceptance
Even if a shopper commits to buy, you can still lose the sale if the transaction gets declined. The ultimate authorisation decision sits with the card issuer. However, it doesn’t mean that merchants can’t improve their payment acceptance levels.
Acquirers can also help give you a better view of your payments acceptance performance and provide advice on improvement areas.
Reduce fraud and chargebacks
Fraud is an ever-growing headache for merchants, and it costs heavily to have an inefficient fraud prevention strategy in place. Your acquirer should be able to supply you with tools to help reduce your fraud and chargeback levels through effective customer authentication, identity verification services, and tailored risk management monitoring.
This valuable support can help you drastically reduce costs by separating fraudsters from genuine customers and reducing chargeback management’s significant costs.
Tackle regulatory change
Payments regulation can be complex and confusing; whether it is meeting the obligations of PSD2’s Strong Customer Authentication, data security and privacy laws or sector-specific regulation, it all takes time and resources to navigate. Since regulation is something that no business can afford to ignore, this is another area where acquirers can really lend a hand.
As payments experts, acquirers have to have a strong understanding of regulations and act as valuable advisors to merchants and understand what each change means for your business, what you need to be aware of, and what action you need to take.
Support growth
Whether you’re looking to grow domestically or cross-border, you need the right payment methods and technical connections in place. Working with the right acquirer can ensure you can support all the different ways your customers want to pay, including alternative payment methods and different models such as recurring billing. Having the right payment mix can help you break into new markets and segments with greater success by ensuring you are catering to consumer preferences.
International acquirers
International acquirers can also offer valuable insight into the market dynamics (regulations, scheme issues, customer demographics etc.) of new geographies that you’re looking to target – giving you a head-start in preparing for new market entry.
For any merchant struggling with their payments operations – or indeed any one of the above challenges, look to your acquirer for assistance.
If you’d like to know more about how TrustPay assists its merchant customers with these core areas, get in touch at sales@trustpay.eu.
